While the present invention has many aspects and embodiments, this section will focus on those aspects which relate to display devices. While there are a large number of various different types of display devices, one very common display device utilizes pixel electrodes to control a display medium such as a liquid crystal layer in order to create an image. These pixel electrodes may control other types of display media such as electrophoretic display media or organic light emitting diodes (OLED). Typically, a pixel electrode works by creating locally an electric field relative to another electrode. A display medium is sandwiched between the two electrodes and reacts to this electric field. Well known examples of such types of displays are the active matrix liquid crystal displays used in modern laptop computers.
FIG. 1 shows an example of a backplane for an active matrix display in the prior art. As is well known, a plurality of pixel electrodes, such as pixel electrode 9C, are arranged in an array of rows and columns. Each row of pixel electrodes is controlled by a row electrode such as row electrodes 2, 3, and 4. At least one transistor device is coupled to each pixel electrode in order to control the updating of new data to the pixel electrode in order to change the image being displayed. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, the field effect transistor (FET) 9A couples the pixel electrode 9C to the data line 1 on column 5 when row 2 receives a high voltage signal (e.g. 5 volts), causing the data value provided on column 5 to be stored onto the capacitor 9B which in turn causes the storage of a voltage value on the pixel electrode 9C. As is known in the art, each row receives a plurality of data in parallel substantially simultaneously as each row's signal line goes high, causing the gate electrode to allow the transistor device to conduct, thereby causing the data from the associated column to be written to the pixel electrode through the capacitor. It will be appreciated in certain embodiments that the capacitor is merely optional and the capacitance of the FET device itself will be sufficient to store the charge for the pixel electrode to thereby maintain the pixel electrode at a certain voltage. Thus the display is updated one row at a time where each row receives in parallel a plurality of data from the parallel columns, such as columns 5, 6, 7 and column 8 as shown in FIG. 1. It will be appreciated that each pixel cell includes a display driver such as display drivers 9, 10, and 11 which control associated pixel electrodes in the display shown in FIG. 1.
While the foregoing display architecture works well generally for many types of applications, it is well known that manufacturing these displays is expensive due to poor yields when the size of the display is large. Further, these displays are by necessity rigid as they are formed on glass and include layers such as polysilicon which are not flexible. Further, the use of polysilicon to create the active backplane of the display means that the electrical characteristics of the display are inferior to single crystal silicon integrated circuits.